THE KASTELLAN HEIR.

FOUR NAMES.

Emeric looked smaller in the hospital bed than he ever had in his wingback chair.

The mask had been removed. His lips were cracked, his skin the color of old candle wax, but his eyes were open and lucid, and when Ronan pushed through the door at two in the morning, they lit with the same sharp, sardonic gleam.

"There he is," the old man rasped. "The young master. You look terrible."

"You should see the other guy." Ronan sat on the edge of the bed and gripped the frail hand. "Don't talk. Rest."

"I've been resting for three days. It's boring." Emeric's cracked lips twitched. "Where's my granddaughter?"

"Right here." Sienna stepped from the shadows, her face tear-streaked and fierce. She dropped into the chair beside the bed and took his other hand. "You scared me, old man."

"Good. Someone should."

For a moment nobody spoke. The monitors beeped. Rain ticked on the window.

Sienna had been silent through all of this, her thumb moving in slow circles over her grandfather's knuckles. She had grown up in this man's shadow. She had learned to shoot in his gun room, to read a balance sheet on his knee, to hold her tongue at his side. When she was nine, he had taught her a card trick and made her swear never to reveal it. She had never revealed it, not even to Ronan.

Now she bent and pressed her forehead to the old man's hand, and Ronan looked away to give her the privacy of it.

"You are not allowed to leave me," she whispered. "Do you understand? I have a list of things I'm still angry at you about."

"A long list, I imagine." Emeric's voice was faint and fond. "I look forward to every item."

"Ronan," Emeric said at last. "Sit closer. What I'm going to say, I cannot say twice."

Ronan leaned in.

"The night your parents died," the old man whispered, "I was supposed to be driving. Patrick sent me away at the last moment. Told me to take the evening off. I remember thinking it was odd. He was never careless." His fingers tightened. "I've spent thirty years wondering if he knew. If he sent me away to spare me."

"He did," Ronan said. "I read his letter."

Emeric closed his eyes. A single tear slid down his temple and vanished into the pillow. "Then I can die without asking."

"You're not dying."

"We'll see." A ghost of the gold-toothed grin. "But that is not why I called you here. There is a thing I discovered while I lay in this bed pretending to be unconscious."

Sienna's head lifted. "Pretending?"

"For the first two days I was truly under. But yesterday, I woke, and I was clever enough to keep still." Emeric's voice sank to a breath. "A man came into the room. Wearing scrubs, but he was no nurse. He checked the machines, and he spoke on a phone. He didn't know I was awake."

Ronan's heart hammered. "What did he say?"

"Only a few words. 'He's still breathing. The boy doesn't know about the source.'" Emeric swallowed. "Then: 'Yes, the leak was worth it. The dump yard was perfect.'"

Sienna's face drained. "The dump yard."

"That's the only place they've ever needed to kill you, Ronan. And only four people knew you'd go there."

Ronan felt the temperature in the room drop. "Alfred. Sienna. Warrick. Quill."

"Four names," Emeric said quietly. "One of them belongs to Aldric."

"It isn't Sienna," Ronan said at once.

"Nor Alfred," said Sienna, fiercely. "Alfred took a bullet."

"Which leaves two." Emeric's eyes were half-closed. "I would not have said this a week ago. I've known Warrick for twenty years. Quill, only a few days. But I have lived a long time, young master, and I have learned that betrayal never wears the face of an enemy."

The door creaked. A night nurse stuck her head in, disapproving. "Visiting hours are long over."

"Two minutes," Sienna said, in a voice that could have cut glass.

The nurse retreated.

"Emeric," Ronan said, "how do I find out?"

The old man smiled. His eyes drifted shut. "Your grandfather taught me a trick, back when the company was young. He called it the canary. Give each suspect a different lie. Then wait to see which lie comes home."

Sienna watched the slow rise and fall of his chest for a long moment. Outside, a nurse's cart squeaked past the door, and somewhere down the hall a monitor chimed. It was the small, ordinary sounds of a hospital at night, and to Ronan they seemed impossibly fragile, as if the whole world were made of glass and only a handful of people were holding it up.

He was asleep before the sentence ended.

---

The sky was going gray by the time they reached the estate. The rain had stopped. Steam curled off the wet gravel, and the silver dog lifted its enormous head as the car pulled in, thumping its tail once against the steps.

Ronan didn't go to bed. He sat at his grandfather's desk in the study with a pad of paper and a fountain pen. Sienna sat across from him, arms folded, watching him write.

"Four lies," he said. "Four different details about Vivienne's mission. If Aldric ever repeats one, we'll know who gave it to him."

"And the real plan?"

"Only you and I. And Vivienne."

Sienna went still. "You trust her that much?"

"I don't trust her at all." He capped the pen. "But I trust that she's terrified of Aldric, and terror is a very reliable motive."

"That's a cold thing to say."

"It's what your grandfather's been teaching me." He looked up. "Sienna. I'm not asking you to like her."

"I don't."

"I know."

"She kissed another man in front of you. In your office. I was there when you were putting your old life back together with tape and glue. And now she walks into your house in the rain, and you..." She stopped, and to Ronan's astonishment, her voice wobbled. "You look at her the way you looked at the box in the dump."

He put down the pen.

"Like what?"

"Like something precious that you thought was lost."

"That's not..."

"Then what is it?"

He stood, came around the desk, and crouched in front of her chair so their eyes were level. Her face was tired and unguarded and unbearably beautiful in the gray light.

"It's guilt," he said. "It's a part of me that can't hate her the way I want to, because her grandfather loved me, and she never did. It isn't love. It's only the ghost of it. And I'm finished with ghosts."

A long silence. Sienna reached out and touched his cheek.

"Good," she whispered. "Because I have very little patience for ghosts."

She kissed him, quick and fierce. Then she stood, brushed off her skirt, and became an executive again.

"I'll draft the lies," she said briskly. "Alfred gets the phone case. Warrick, the brooch. Quill, the pen."

"And you?"

"I'm the button on my sleeve. I'll give myself one just to be thorough."

She headed for the door. She paused with her hand on the handle.

"Ronan?"

"Yes?"

"If it is Warrick..." Her voice sank. "He was at my grandfather's funeral. He carried the coffin."

"I know."

"I don't want it to be him."

"Neither do I."

She left. Ronan sat down, picked up the pen, and stared at four blank lines on the paper. Then, slowly, he began to write.